The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble: review

Serena Davies enjoys Margaret Drabble's The Pattern in the Carpet, a
passionate account of a life lived through puzzles

By Serena Davies

6:00AM BST 01 Apr 2009

What a puzzle: Margaret Drabble’s memoir cum history of the jigsaw cum paean to her rather dull aunt shouldn’t really work. But somehow, in the end, it seduces.

The novelist, who is 70 this year and in reflective mode after her husband Michael Holroyd’s recent bout of cancer, wrote this book because she needed a break from fiction. She wanted to use “simpler shapes and brighter colours than I have used in my work of late” and, following a chain of associations begun when she found the calming act of putting together a jigsaw had brought her consolation during the unhappiness of Holroyd’s illness, she lit on the idea of telling the story of the jigsaw interwoven with her own childhood memories of doing puzzles with her aunt Phyllis Bloor.

The book is a stream of consciousness, flitting about chaotically, sometimes alighting on something interesting, at other times lost in the whimsical. Disappointingly, the chunk near the start where Phyllis’s life is built up and Drabble’s memories of childhood visits to Bryn, a house in Lincolnshire on the Great North Road that was the home of her maternal grandparents and, later, Phyllis, is repetitive and dull. Perhaps its scenes are too soaked in the writer’s nostalgia – a topic, incidentally, about which Drabble writes brilliantly further on in the book – for her to see that it may not inspire the same sentiment in the reader.

Phyllis, a spinster teacher who came to prefer her dog’s company to that of humans, had an uneventful, limited life. But she was wonderful with children and formed the main influence on Drabble’s early sallies into jigsaw making. She taught the infant Maggie always to do the edge first before filling in the middle. This memory leads Drabble to ponder the meaningfulness of the “edge” in a jigsaw and whether the fact that the jigsaw is of a finite, circumscribed shape brings a comfort of its own in this messy world.

The history of the jigsaw is scattered chronologically through the rest of the book, interspersed with thoughts on Drabble’s childhood, her process of researching this work, how nasty Alison Uttley, the creator of Little Grey Rabbit, was in real life, John Clare’s longing for the rural idyll, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alan Sillitoe, Emile Zola and just about anyone else you can think of, and several you can’t.

The London engraver and cartographer, John Spilsbury, is traditionally credited with inventing the jigsaw in 1766 in the form of a dissected map cut up along the lines of countries’ borders. You can still see examples of his work in the British Library. Drabble gives him generous mention, but wonders, too, about other progenitors of the pursuit, including the first-known board game, the 16th-century European Royal Game of the Goose, which was also derived from the idea of a map.

Her tale wanders through discussions of 19th-century diversions – cards and spills as well as jigsaws – to the US jigsaw craze in the early Thirties when hundreds of now forgotten “jigsaw artists” created bucolic scenes to cheer up Depression America. She also tells us about “The World’s Most Difficult Puzzle” (that was the title of a Radio 4 programme on the subject), a 340-piece jigsaw based on Jackson Pollock’s painting Convergence, a sea of Abstract Expressionist squiggles and swirls. When it was brought out in 1964 it was deemed so hard that it became a kind of status symbol to have finished it, and people had their completed puzzles turned into coffee tables and wall plaques. The man in the radio programme took nearly eight hours to complete it. Drabble says she took much longer, but then she kept getting the image on the box upside down.

Vignettes such as this are enjoyable, and Drabble’s writing throughout this book is without hubris, touchingly human and often wise. I think The Pattern in the Carpet is meant to feel like a jigsaw itself, with its oddly shaped, non-homogenous pieces slotting together in surprising ways. This conceit alleviates the irritation of its lazy structure, and helps you forgive the occasional self-indulgence of its writer. It is also a book with such enthusiasm for its subject matter that it makes you long to embark on your own jigsaw. Although not, perhaps, of Convergence.